


growing up is hard

by hupsoonheng



Series: Nuclearstuck [8]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Cannibalism, Dystopia, Gen, Gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-11
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-25 02:56:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/634378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>growing up is a vicious business. </p><p>(short peeks into the childhoods of various characters growing up in the nukestuck world)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> a oneshot i wrote at work last night while stuck on other fics
> 
> T is the right rating for this right??

The air drops happen once every two months, vast crates of mostly food parachuting in from a low-flying plane. The humans are too scared, you get told, too frightened of the trolls of New Alternia 5. You’re barely two sweeps old, your grub nubs still itchy, when you start joining the other wrigglers making a mad dash for the crates. At first you don’t understand what they’re all running for—the crates’ contents are meant to be rationed, something like a bi-monthly federal apology for the state of the American troll. Those are the words adults use to describe it, anyway. You just run for the exhilaration of it. 

What you discover by the time you hit two and a half is that the first crate of food has been designated by the Grand Highblood himself just for this purpose, to teach wrigglers ferocity and competitiveness. For any wrigglers between three and six, it’s also pretty much the only source of food. When you turn three sweeps old yourself, you join those ranks, and you finally get close enough to the crates to witness one of your nurserymates get trampled to death. You can’t recognize them by the time the adults drag the corpse away. 

New Alternia is mostly highbloods, but occasionally someone comes back from the world beyond the district walls to drop their eggs, without telling anyone they coupled with a lowblood. By the time the unfortunate grub hatches, the parent is usually long gone, and they’re left to grow up tormented and alone, many not even lasting long enough to be properly traumatized by it. 

There’s two such wrigglers in your nursery class, a pair of olivebloods named Desino and Daelan from the same unlucky clutch. You have hazy memories of everyone getting along as grubs, but after you all pupate the adults in your lives seem to do everything in their power to point out the hemocaste and where these two lie on it. They hold hands a lot. 

They turn out to be a boy and a girl, respectively. Daelan spends a lot of her time defending Desino, who is the most pathetic excuse for a troll you’ve ever seen. He sucks his thumb well into his third sweep, fondling a horn with his free hand when he does, and he cries “easier than a stuck pig,” one of your teachers sneers one day, which doesn’t have any context for any of you, but “piggy” sticks to Desino as a nickname. It doesn’t take long for you and the other highblood wrigglers to outstrip both the olivebloods in size. Their blueblood clutchmates offer them no support, or even recognition, especially when a young hyena gets it into their head to jump on Desino’s pudgy back and grab onto his low-slung horns, digging their knees in until he starts running. 

Most wrigglers are scrawny, underfed things, some of them with taut bellies from malnutrition, others stronger with stringy muscle developing, but Desino is soft and chubby, and when you’re about six sweeps old, a lot of your nurserymates start speculating that he’s been stealing rations from the crates. Personally, you think the idea doesn’t hold even a drop of water; Desino wouldn’t take a risk that big if his life depended on it, and you’re not sure he could pull it off even if that weren’t true. (Daelan, though, you might suspect her of stealing for him, if she were as healthy-looking. She’s not.) You’re not really part of the grapevine, though, and just when you think that rumor has passed, you come across Desino being cornered by a pair of purpleblood wrigglers, who you know to be called Kolreu and Shrono. 

“Sup, brothers?” you greet as they look at you over their shoulders. Desino is backed against a wall of some so-called hivestem or another, black eyes wide and scared, enough that he doesn’t even try to make a break for it when the other two trolls don’t have an eye on him. 

“I think you got eyeballs all up in your head what can be makin’ that assessment for you, brother,” Kolreu returns. He’s got long fishhook horns that curve over the top of his head, and he’s always one of the first wrigglers to the crate (unlike you, who waits until the extra aggro motherfuckers have cleared away so you can get an armful and go. No need to get yourself hurt, after all). “We done and caught ourselves a thief.” 

“How is it you’re knowin’ Des a thief?” you ask, chewing one of your claws distractedly. “I ain’t never seen what transgressions you’re accusin’ him of, and I ain’t even got a notion that he would be committin’ ‘em.” The main textbooks in nursery are dictionaries and a thesaurus or two that you all fight over. “He’s too soft.” 

“You ain’t wrong, brother,” Shrono agrees with a shrug. “But ain’t none of us all roly-poly what like this little motherfucker’s got paddin’ out his skelebones. And he ain’t tellin’ us no truthful words about what made him that way.” 

“I done told you, alls I got is the junk food from what’s in the crates,” Desino whimpers, which attracts Kolreu and Shrono’s attention again. “I only got the truth to tell. My stomach all up and twisted with aches same as yours! It’s gots to be genetics, or something like that.” He speaks a bastardized version of hyena vernacular, belonging with neither the purple nor bluebloods, and your educated guess is that he wanted to appeal to the ones more likely to kill him; now it’s the only way he knows how to speak. It actually just pisses them off more, unfortunately for him. 

“You got smarts up in your thinknug, Makara,” Shrono says, not turning this time. “You think we got ourselves a sticky-fingers motherfucker?”

“Nah, not so much,” you say with a shake of your head. Lucky for Desino that you came around, you guess. Maybe they’ll leave him alone for the day. 

“I got more smarts than Gamzee fuckin’ Makara,” Kolreu snarls. “Ain’t matter he know who his daddy is, that don’t give a motherfucker life experience. And this is all up and bein’ a thief we got in front of our visages.” 

You don’t get a chance to stop him before he tears Desino open, right in the soft belly. 

What makes it horrible is that Desino is still alive as his guts pour out of him, snot-nosed screaming and crying in his pain. “Yeah, there’s that thieved shit,” Kolreu laughs; Shrono isn’t quite as strong of stomach and is gagging. Kolreu hit low and the smells coming from Desino’s organs aren’t great; you don’t feel too daisy, yourself. “Now I’m gonna be takin’ my share.” 

Kolreu squats down and plunges a hand up inside Desino, aiming up away from his intestines, and when he pulls out a gob of unidentifiable bloody flesh, Shrono does throw up. Desino is slipping away, but Kolreu doesn’t let the opportunity pass to make Desino’s last seconds alive as shitty as possible, bracing himself against the wall so he can lean in close to the lowblood’s face and take a big bite of his handful. Olive blood smears with his crude grey clown makeup that he’s technically not allowed to wear yet, and he smiles just in time for Desino to die. 

“How ‘bout you two soft fuckers, are you wantin’ a bite—” Kolreu starts to say, turning with a big green grin, but he doesn’t get to finish as your hand curls around the back of his head and slams his face against the wall, just above Desino’s head. 

“Whoa, Makara, it was just—” Shrono says, but you decide you don’t have to listen to either of them. If Shrono wants to defend Kolreu, he’s guilty, too. Kolreu’s just worse, so you’re gonna take care of him first. He’s trying to say something through his broken teeth and broken nose, maybe defending himself, or maybe trying to insult you into insecurity, which sounds more Kolreu’s style, but it doesn’t matter. You take a stronger hold on his head with a fistful of dirty, matted hair, and you smash his face into the crumbling brick wall until it’s mostly just purple mush. 

When you drop him, you’re not sure if he’s still breathing, but Shrono’s gone. You can tell by the vomit-traced footprints which way he went, though, and you bolt after him. He hasn’t made it very far, maybe weak with nausea or fear or both; whatever the case, he’s slumped against another nearby wall. 

“Gamzee, man, you gotta get your believe on, it was all Kolreu,” he pleads, holding his hands up like he’s gonna fucking pray. “I was only wantin’ to scare the li’l shit for maybe bein’ a thief! I ain’t even know if that was all truthful or what, I just wanted to have a li’l bit of fun!” 

“You ain’t did nothin’ to stop him,” you say as you close in on him, still shaking a few drops of purple from your left hand. 

“Neither did you,” Shrono retorts, right before realizing that was the wrong answer. “Shit, I mean—”

“I’m doin’ something right the fuck now,” you say, and you grab Shrono by the shoulders to throw him face-down against the gravel. Shrono has time to shout _No—!_ before your heel crunches down on the back of his neck. 

Once you’re done dry-heaving, you go back to Desino’s body, and you crack the very dead Kolreu’s face against the wall one more time to get some fresh blood going so you can paint a crude clown face on Desino’s features. It’s kind of like initiating him, maybe, letting him belong in death; at the very least you can make him smile. 

Later on, Daelan finds you and mutters some very reluctant thanks; nobody fucks with her much anymore, but she also avoids the shit out of you.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> tavros, aradia and sollux growing up in new alternia 4

You can’t even remember a time before the highbloods. There are three of them, purplebloods at least twice your size and five times your strength by the time you’re three sweeps old. They terrorize you from before memory—all three of you, really, but you’re their special favorite. 

The three of you means Aradia, Sollux and yourself, and all together you represent the lowest of the low, the bottom of the hemospectrum and probably the world, at least in your experience. Neither of them are your clutchmates, although you all pupated around the same time, but you’re barely aware of your real clutchmates, because Aradia and Sollux are your whole world. Even when you feel kind of left out watching them act like moirails before you even know what pale romance means, you couldn’t think of being close with anyone else. 

You’ve all got psychic abilities of some kind, like most lowbloods, although a lot of the time you’re of the opinion that your ability to commune with animals is the most useless of them all. Aradia’s telekinesis is steady and strong, just enough to make her formidable without overwhelming her. Sollux’s, on the other hand, is powerful—in fact, too powerful, most evident in the way it eats his body from the inside out. Everything about him is concave where your body is round, and you wish you could donate some of your fat to him, especially when he glares at you like he’s jealous of your body mass. 

The other drawback to his psionics are the migraines that occur far too often, making him cruel and grouchy—mostly to you. Some days you look for the target sign painted on your back. 

The highbloods are the only three of their color, two girls and a boy—Keztun, Urzuka and Stelko. Keztun is the ringleader, bigger than the other two and seemingly smarter too, although that might just be your own opinion based on how easily she always seems to find you. If that target sign does exist, she always finds it. 

You hate that you don’t have the ability to walk around your own district in peace and relative safety. This is a majority lowblood district, after all, chock full of rustbloods like yourself, and somehow they still manage to think they have some kind of inherent superiority. The only time they ever get knocked down a peg is when adults catch them doing something bad, but the older they get, the less verbal punishment works. You’re feeling rebellious today, though, four sweeps old and strong, so you strike out on your own just to go for a walk. As little as you think of your powers, you do enjoy exercising them, and it might be nice to see how that family of rats you found is doing. They seem to like you. 

“Look what I found,” you hear as you’re walking, and the next thing you know there’s a hand wrapping around one of your horns, yanking you back. “It’s our favorite shitblood!” 

“Leave me alone, Keztun!” you yelp, hands scrabbling around her fingers, which hold fast. 

“You’ve got a lot of sass today, huh, Nitram?” Urzuka says as she swings out in front of you, blocking your path. When your eyes flick to one side you see Stelko in your peripheral vision, blocking your last possible exit path. 

“I-I’ve got, I’ve got sass, every day of my life,” you stammer, and both girls roar with laughter. (Stelko almost never says anything.) 

“Nah, but we’ll give you points for trying today,” Urzuka chuckles as Keztun gives you a shake. 

“So listen, Nitram,” Keztun says, casual as you please as she turns you around in one violent movement. “Me ’n’ the other highbloods, we were thinking, today’s a beautiful fuckin’ day to play kickball!” 

“But see,” Urzuka chimes in, “we ain’t got a ball.” Suddenly the highbloods seem a lot closer, hemming you in. “You’re about the right size, though.” 

“And about as round,” Keztun snickers. “Whatta you been eating, Nitram? You sure you’re sticking to rations?” 

“You’re just a w-wannabe hyena! All of... All of you!” you wheeze as Keztun hefts you up. You screw your eyes shut as soon as the words leave your mouth, knowing you just made it worse for yourself. 

Stelko manages to actually catch you when you fly through the air, jumping up like a showoff. Then he’s putting you down in the dirt, and when you open your eyes Urzuka is standing some fifteen feet away, hands on her knees and wriggling her ass in the air. You’re not actually sure they know how to play kickball. 

The worst part is that Stelko’s kick is actually pretty powerful, launching you at least halfway toward Urzuka. The girls both laugh at him and call him all kinds of varieties of weakling, but he just bares his gapped teeth and hauls you up by your armpits so he can wind you up like a shotput. You go sailing over Urzuka’s head, and when you land you just don’t wanna get up ever again. 

You hear the thumping of their bare feet on the ground coming toward you; you know you _have_ to get up, but you don’t have it in you. Death is coming, so you may as well just accept it now before it gets much more painful. Then there’s a flash of light, a pitter patter of smaller feet interrupting. Bony hands strain to pull you up at first, and then Aradia is coming around to your front where you can actually see, knocking Sollux’s hands away so she can help you up. 

“Come on, we only just stunned them,” Aradia says as you rise with a groan, and with her help (Sollux is no use here, and he knows it) you limp back to more populated areas of the district. Sollux jogs along just behind you, crowing about how cool his powers looked when he blew Stelko back. 

 

Your favorite movie in the nursery’s small video tape library is Ferngully, which is popular enough with the other wrigglers that it gets a lot of play. Sollux’s is TRON, though, which everyone else finds dull as sin, and it makes a disastrous combination when Sollux is both shorting out and throwing a tantrum over never getting to watch what he likes. 

“We’ve seen this movie a gazillion times,” Sollux grumbles during one such watching of Ferngully, a few weeks later in nursery sprawled all over the floor in front of the TV. Personally, you’re perfectly happy to watch for the gazillionth time. He speaks with a lisp, the product of a split tongue paired with something of an overbite. (Only Aradia can get away with teasing him about it.) 

“Just shut up and watch it, nobody wants to see your weird computer movie,” Aradia says with a shushing finger raised to her lips, although she’s actually louder than Sollux. She’s rewarded with a whack on the head with a particularly gross feather duster, which is pretty unproductive in how it just sets her off coughing. The adult in charge just glares at her, an elderly oliveblood named Aolind who claims she was on the Condesce’s ship itself when it was shot down in South America. You all have your doubts, especially when she can’t seem to remember what part of the continent the ship crashed in. 

Sollux’s groaning from the back of the room keeps getting louder, though, and after a certain point he’s just curled into a ball of pain on the cheap carpeting, Aradia trying helplessly to shush him as she massages his side and glances nervously at Aolind. The movie is almost over but you can’t even hear anything being said (although luckily you’ve seen it so many times you can mouth the lines to yourself). All the other kids in the room besides Aradia is trying to ignore him, but you can tell Aolind is getting irritated, and eventually she gets up and pushes Aradia aside, yanking Sollux up by the back of his shirt. 

“Alright, Captor, go sit outside if you can’t suck it up and be quiet.” Sollux just glares up at her, or you’re pretty sure he is; it’s hard to tell when he doesn’t really have visible pupils. When he’s just hanging out with you and Aradia he tends to turn his head in exaggerated motions to make sure you both know what he’s trying to do with his eyes. 

“It _hurts!”_ he shrieks, sparks of red and blue light dancing around the tips of his horns. “I just—” He goes limp in Aolind’s hold, groaning again, and she shakes him like a naughty pet. “Leave me _alone!_ I just wanted to watch TRON!” 

His outburst is followed by a scream, that scream followed by a flash that barely registers before the TV gives out with a loud pop and a lot of smoke. Coughing wrigglers scrabble away from the set, and Aolind quickly directs you all to get out of the room. She follows you while yanking Sollux along, but when you glance back at the TV, you see the VCR is leaking black melted plastic, and you can smell it even from here. You whimper, but you congratulate yourself later for not crying with full-on sobs. 

Sollux gets put in isolation for the rest of the school night. 

The ration trucks come at first light, driven by trolls who live in integrated society because humans don’t like the idea of being alone in a district full of hungry, resentful trolls. While adult trolls are receiving the rations, you and Aradia wait for Sollux to be let out of iso; he’s so weak you both have to support him on the way back to the shed you three share. He snickers the whole way though, and when you ask to be let in on the joke he says he left plenty of puke for the adults to clean up. You and Aradia both laugh with him, until laughing sets off some twinge in the back of Sollux’s head and he falls silent again. 

Sollux is too out of it to go to rations, so he hands his ticket to Aradia and burrows into the already-sweaty sheets. Aradia runs ahead, always faster than you, and scores an early place in the line; by the time you get there she motions you over, and yanks you in next to her. Most other kids view you as kind of a loser so nobody says anything, at least, although it might also have to do with the way Aradia glares at anyone who even looks at you right now. You’re closing in on the front of the line when two grey blurs bound past you. 

“Oh no, you two get back!” the adult in charge of children’s rations shouts, slapping Stelko away. Keztun snarls before she gets a slap to the face, too; even if she’s the biggest four-sweep-old in the district, she’s still smaller than any adult around. 

“We need our rations _now!_ We have our tickets and everything!” Keztun growls, brandishing two tickets. You can see Stelko’s clutched in his fingers—is Keztun picking up Urzuka’s, the same way you’re picking up for Sollux? 

“You get to the back of the goddamn line, you dirty little shits,” the adult says, foot swinging out, and Keztun dodges in barely the nick of time. Stelko isn’t as lucky. “This isn’t Alternia!” He shakes his fist as the two of them lope away. 

You help Aradia carry Sollux’s rations back to the shed with your own, swinging the bag between you. When you get back Sollux is still feeling like shit, eyes rheumy and horns sparking dimly. You leave Sollux’s bag to Aradia and she puts it down on the floor, sitting cross-legged next to the big mattress you all share. “We got your rations,” she says, pulling up a loaf of sliced white bread from Sollux’s bag just enough to open it and take out two slices. Her arm goes back in, digging probably for more sandwich supplies. 

“Yippee,” he says, voice rife with sarcasm. “I get to live for another month! Fucking great.” 

“Stop that,” she snaps as she puts together a cheese sandwich. Sollux hates American cheese, but the day you get anything better is the day you get out of the district, honestly, and it’s a quick meal. “Come on, I know you feel crappy, but if you don’t eat I’m gonna punch you in the head.” 

“Oh, yeah, that’ll make me feel loads better,” he spits, before pulling the sheet over his head. “Leave me alone, Aradia!” 

“Why would I do that?” she says, tearing the sheet back down with ease. “You have to eat, idiot.” 

“I don’t have to do anything but _die!”_ He tries to pull the sheet up again, but Aradia’s at least twice his strength and her grip on it means it’s not going anywhere. She throws the sheet to the other side of the bed completely, crawling onto it carefully to not dislodge the mismatched flat sheet underneath that covers the mattress itself. Sollux makes a couple squawking noises of protest, but he’s helpless to stop her as she sits behind him to wrap her legs around his waist and pins his arms behind his back with one arm thrown around his chicken chest. 

“I’ve got you now, Captor!” she crows. “Now you have to eat!” 

“I don’t _want_ to eat, and you can’t make me chew and swallow, either!” he shrieks, twisting feebly. 

“Not if I get Tavros to help me and pinch your nose,” she said with a wicked grin, pushing the sandwich against Sollux’s lips. “Do you really want it to get that embarrassing? Just eat, you big baby.” You wave your hands frantically to indicate how much you don’t want to be involved in this, but they’re both ignoring you. 

“No! Just let me die, I’m so sick of being alive!” Sollux’s horns spark a little more dangerously now, back arching until his xylophone ribs can be counted through his shirt. “I hate being alive! It doesn’t ever not suck!” 

The air goes still for a moment while Sollux’s ugly words hang over you all, their truth heavy, and then Aradia is pulling Sollux back down with a quick jerk of her arm. “Don’t be so dramatic. Take at least a bite.” And he does, finally, albeit with a big grouchy pout. 

Things are getting a little too pale for you in here, so you sneak out of the shed. You end up just going for a little stroll, kicking up dustclouds with the talking toes of your shoes. The term “talking shoes” in your head makes you smile, so you sit down by the side of someone else’s shack and flap your feet at each other, imagining a conversation going back and forth. Your right foot ends up being Aradia, the left Sollux. Then a real voice interrupts. 

“Come on, Zu, I finally got your rations,” you hear Keztun saying, and you peek out from around the corner. “Sit the fuck up.” A cross-legged Keztun is holding Urzuka’s upper body up with one arm, the other hand holding out a single slice of the same bread Aradia used to make Sollux’s sandwich. “Take a bite here at least so I can drag your ass home.” 

Urzuka is uncharacteristically silent, and you can’t see her face at all from here. Stelko is nowhere to be found. 

“Don’t do this to me, Urzuka, you piece of shit, don’t do this to me,” Keztun continues, shaking the other highblood as she drops the uneaten bread back in the bag. “Come on!” Apparently Urzuka won’t come on, though, because a few seconds later Keztun is curling over with both arms around her, and you freeze when you see her shoulders shaking, especially because now you can see Urzuka’s very dead face. You shouldn’t be here. 

That’s when Keztun looks over her shoulder and spots you, wild-eyed and furious. You take a step back, trembling. “What the fuck are you looking at, shitblood?” she barks, hugging Urzuka’s corpse closer. “Go the fuck away before I tear your fucking guts out!” 

You know you should run. You know she means it. You might too, if you were an angry young highblood with a dead friend. Instead you take cautious steps closer, Keztun’s body tensing with each step. You keep telling yourself you’re stupid, suicidal, and you wait for pain as you kneel down next to your mortal enemy. 

“I’m sorry,” you say in a small voice, laying a hand on Keztun’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.” 

Her eyes are still tinted purple from crying, and they flicker down and then back up to your face in disbelief. “Shut the fuck up.” 

“I’m sorry, that your friend is dead,” you say, a little louder this time, putting a brave second hand just below the first. “I know it hurts to, uh, watch someone waste away, like that...” 

She’s still tense, but she puts one hand over both of yours, still looking at you with confusion and distrust. You flinch at first, until you’re absolutely sure she’s not disemboweling you or tearing your limbs off. You’re not sure what you see in her eyes, but there’s something back there, blossoming deep—

“Get away from him!” A rock explodes against the corrugated wall over Keztun’s head, showering you both in sharp pebbles. The shock is enough that Keztun’s hand spasms, clawing you across the top of one of your own hands. You draw back your hands with a sharp cry of pain, and then Aradia is pulling you up by the elbow. “Tavros, come on!” 

As you run behind her, you glance back, but Keztun is gone, and with her Urzuka’s body and rations. Later on Aradia tends to the wounds on your hand, grumbling about how you have to stop wandering off so damn much, because those highbloods are always lurking.


End file.
